 |
|
|
|
awareness |
|
 |
EVENT AT A GLANCE
Objective: Showcase the newly combined CME Group as the largest derivatives exchange in the world, and position the organization as an industry thought-leader.
Strategy: Host an invite-only conference for C-level executives with access to speakers, economists, and business leaders. Provide an opportunity for attendees to discuss and debate critical economic issues with their peers.
Tactics: Preserve the event’s attendance during a crisis in the financial industry with on-the-fly contingency plans, such as on-site editorial expertise and 24/7 communications.
Results: Attracted roughly 175 attendees — 17 percent more than the goal of 150 — and retained 91 percent of scheduled speakers despite massive industry turmoil on the conference’s opening day. Attendees rated the debut event a 4.9 out of 5.
|
|
 h, Florida. With warm sea and sky temps most likely to whip up Atlantic hurricanes between June 1 and Oct. 31 each year, marketers taking their events to The Sunshine State during this period know to have some weather contingencies in place.
So when Chicago-based CME Group planned its first-ever Global Financial Leadership Conference (GFLC) for Sept. 15-17, 2008, at the Ritz-Carlton Golf Resort in Naples, FL, it was ready for weather. But the possibility of rainy days aside, the company had no reason to think there would be anything unusual about its chosen dates — or the conference itself. “Little did we know we’d be confronted with a storm of a different sort,” says Randy Frink, CME Group’s associate director for corporate marketing.
CME Group, which was formed in 2007 as the result of a merger between the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade, was simply looking to roll out its new brand and reinforce a thought-leadership position within the industry by holding an executive-level event. “We felt that, given our role and prominence in the financial landscape, it was time for us to convene industry thought leaders and put ourselves in the middle of the conversation, rather than just being a part of others’ events,” Frink says.
The three-day GFLC would give the company a venue to bring together its top institutional-investor clients and economists, financiers, and other market experts for far-ranging and high-level discussions about global trading and finance issues such as index strategies, credit, and perspectives on emerging markets. Among the luminaries scheduled to attend were keynote speakers Paul Volker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve; former British Prime Minister Tony Blair; and well-regarded CNBC reporter Maria Bartiromo; along with a roster of finance-firm executives as session moderators and panelists.
The rock-solid lineup, thought the CME Group team, would support idea and opinion exchange among a hand-picked audience of approximately 150 executive-level attendees, and give a shine to the merged organization’s new brand as the group that brought the brain trust together.
CME Group and its event-marketing partner, Jack Morton Worldwide, spent six months leading up to the summer event setting the stage for the exclusive experience. Private podcasts with scheduled speakers, distributed to registered attendees ahead of time, gave them an insider preview of the content to come on site, while a private concierge line, helmed by Jack Morton staff, assisted attendees with questions and travel plans.
As rumblings in the domestic financial world — at the time, focused primarily on the subprime-mortgage fallout — grew louder, the planning team forged ahead, all the while confident that CME Group would gain stronger client relationships thanks to the GFLC’s timely and relevant agenda and content plan. But those rumblings were just the beginning of an economic storm that threatened to rain all over the CME Group’s parade.
A PERFECT STORM
On Saturday, Sept. 13, amid rumors of the financial industry’s looming freefall, CME Group and Jack Morton staff headed down to Naples to begin setting up the event. “We knew we were in uncertain times,” says Candace Thomas, account director at Jack Morton.
 By Sunday, the impact of the shaky economy was becoming clear — as was its potential effect on the conference. “We started receiving calls and e-mails from several speakers,” Frink says. The message was obvious and Monday was looking like it could be ugly. Speakers, who included scheduled session moderator and CNBC anchor Bartiromo and panelist Ken Griffin, founder, president, and CEO of Citadel Investment Group, were unsure they would be able to hop a flight out of the billowing economic storm to make the next day’s sessions. That session, Perspectives on the Global Credit Crisis, was one of the most highly anticipated and timely conference topics for this audience of finance executives, whose companies both extend and rely upon credit. “We absolutely needed to make this thing happen,” Frink says. But with Bartiromo’s and Griffin’s availability suddenly in jeopardy, the session looked like it might be scrubbed.
For an event focused on the finance industry, this wasn’t just bad timing. It was a potential catastrophe. Every attendee, speaker, moderator, and presenter was a global-finance professional. The crisis was certain to consume their attention. How could a debut event with no track record compete with the fast-motion drama unfolding on Wall Street and throughout the global-finance community?
There wasn’t much the team could do beyond crossing their fingers to ensure attendees would make the trip. But if attendees did come, yet spent the visit glued to CNBC and cell phones in their hotel rooms, the event would suffer a likely fatal blow. And with just 22 speakers and presenters on the tightly focused roster, any speaker cancellations could greatly impact the attendee experience.
To keep the event afloat, CME Group and Jack Morton moved into crisis mode, adopting an on-the-ground, minute-by-minute approach to wrangling presenters and content to mitigate the unfolding drama’s prospective impact on the inaugural GFLC.
Frink started by pulling the travel
itineraries of the Global Credit panelists. Looking at each panelist’s arrival
and departure schedules and comparing
them to his overall event agenda, he
began looking for another time slot that would
have most of the panelists
on site, while minimizing
disruption to the rest of the
conference agenda.
Luckily, the GFLC’s
conference-programming strategy meant a last-minute agenda
shuffle didn’t lead to a domino
effect of dozens of moving parts.
“We weren’t going to have different tracks for different audiences,” Thomas explains. “It was one track, one room.” So, Frink quickly moved the panel to an open slot on Tuesday. Bartiromo, who needed to remain in New York, agreed to participate in the rescheduled session via live satellite feed. On site, panelist Robert Shiller, Stanley B. Resor professor of economics at Yale University, would take over Bartiromo’s moderator duties and would introduce panelist Philip Falcone, senior managing director of Harbinger Capital Partners. (Two other scheduled panelists, Griffin and Thomas Detelich, group general manager and president of consumer and mortgage lending at HSBC Finance Corp., ultimately could not participate.) “But three out of five was better than none,” Frink says.
With this first pass at an agenda shuffle wrapped up, and knowing there were likely to be more on-the-fly moves, Frink and the Jack Morton team turned toward final preparations for the conference opening, set for 3 p.m. on Monday afternoon.
BLACK MONDAY
What really rocked the industry — indeed, the country — on Monday, Sept. 15 wasn’t the conference kick-off but the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., which announced it was filing for bankruptcy protection. As if that weren’t enough to whip up a media monsoon on its own, the news that Bank of America Corp. was buying Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. for $50 billion quickly followed, marking the simultaneous end of two of the country’s most historic investment firms.
 On the heels of the Merrill and Lehman news, the team held its breath and greeted attendees as they arrived. By 3 p.m., the GFLC team enjoyed its first collective exhalation in about 24 hours: Attendees filled the room’s comfortable, black wing chairs, showing that despite the industry upheaval, registrants had made the trip a priority. The lounge-type seating, arranged in front of a vibrant stage backed with a 12-by-40-foot rear-projection video screen, would keep the executives comfortable through the sessions, which would all take place in that one room.
CME Group executive chairman Terry Duffy welcomed attendees and explained that CEO Craig Donohue had to remain in Chicago that afternoon. A little on-the-fly editing evolved Duffy’s welcome speech from a general salutation into a timely commentary. “His remarks were edited to speak directly to what was happening,” Thomas says. “People knew they were not just going to be listening to stock presentations in the coming days.”
After Duffy set the real-time, real-issues tone, keynote speaker Volker then addressed the crowd and segued into a session focused on a central-bank view of global banking and economics. As the Global Credit panel had been rescheduled from Monday to Tuesday, conference staff allowed the global banking presentation and exchange to run longer than scheduled. Immediately after, event staff announced the new schedule for the Global Credit panel, and handed revised agendas to guests as they left the conference room to refresh before a poolside dinner.
|
Avoiding Conference Crises
“We knew that the better our contingency plans were, the less likely we’d need to use them.” So says CME Group associate director for corporate marketing Randy Frink. But planning for inclement weather is one thing; anticipating an economic crisis is another. Still, dealing with the financial storm of September 2008 taught Frink some lasting lessons. The following three tips should help you proactively sidestep event snafus with similar agility. |
|
|
|
1. Prepare for speaker no-shows. Arrange your panels with enough top-flight talent that anyone scheduled to participate can take over as a solo presenter. Another insurance policy: Put contingency plans into every written agreement with your speakers and panelists about coping with potential no-show situations. Require them to make themselves available remotely, or send their next-in-command. And be sure you have complete and current travel itineraries and direct contact information for all speakers, so you can check availability for on-the-fly agenda shifts.
|
2. Keep a list of backup technical support services. “When it became apparent that CNBC anchor Maria Bartiromo couldn’t leave New York for her scheduled moderator duties, we knew it would be a technical issue to make her participation happen,” Frink says. He was able to take advantage of the CNBC satellite truck that was already scheduled to be at the event for Bartiromo, “but if that hadn‘t been available to us, we would have been pulling from local resources to get equipment and technical experts involved to make it happen quickly,” he says. He also considered the possibility of broadcasting a pre-taped segment as a last resort. |
3. Prepare content support to respond to changes. Have a public-relations professional, marketing person, or editor at the ready to process the day’s news and distill it into contextual information for speakers and attendees, and to help speakers incorporate late-breaking information into their presentations to ensure timeliness. “You never know what sort of curveballs will come at you, or what news will be happening outside the conference that will impact attendees,” Frink says. “Having someone on site to skillfully craft what gets delivered from the podium is a huge asset.” This also helps to keep guests calm and focused, as they know they’re staying up to date on the swirling news, a move that will likely result in reduced defection to hotel rooms by attendees seeking breaking-news updates from TV news stations. |
|
|
Tuesday morning brought a series of panels on emerging markets, followed by the eagerly anticipated and rescheduled Global Credit session. Despite the smaller panel, “Our attendees gave us extremely high marks for being able to pull that session together,” Frink says. Indeed, the last-minute scrambling had the effect of making the session seem even more important and timely than ever, he adds. “The satellite feed with Bartiromo
gave them a front-line, behind-the-scenes look at what was happening that day. It turned out to be a big win for us.”
 Frink’s well-planned roster of high-level speakers also provided a built-in contingency plan, albeit a serendipitous one. “I learned that effective event planning is all about constructing panels in a way that allows you to elevate any one of your panelists and have him or her be the sole presenter if need be,” he says. “That was a critical lesson for me.”
To further support the timely and interconnected feel the event had taken on, Frink and Thomas set up members of CME’s corporate marketing staff in a speaker ready room to craft talking points that could be used to prepare the next set of speakers. The staffers were already planning to help run through rehearsals with speakers, but with the industry shakeout unfolding minute-by-minute, their roles expanded to keeping speakers primed with up-to-the-moment facts and details and infusing applicable late-breaking news into their presentations.
An information center stocked with printers, fax machines, cell-phone chargers, and flatscreen TVs — tuned to CNBC and Bloomberg — was located near the session room. This pre-planned element took on increased importance given the turmoil of the week. “It was an incredibly highly trafficked area,” Frink says. “Attendees would routinely pop in to hear firsthand what was being reported, or to plug in their laptops. We didn’t lose people to their hotel rooms because they were able to do what they needed to do without moving away from the event space.”
RISING CONFERENCE STOCK
One would think the unsettling events of the week would overshadow the inaugural GFLC and the CME Group’s objectives entirely. Would attendees be able to focus on the content, or would the shifting market sands on Wall Street consume their attention? Would they completely lose sight of the company that had brought them together?
Instead, the outcome was what CME Group had hoped, and more. Far from having to reassure attendees that they should still make the conference a priority, Frink and Thomas found there was a prevailing sense that GFLC was the place to be. “It ended up being a think-tank environment, where everyone could talk and share their perspectives,” Thomas says. Frink agrees. “Our attendees bonded,” he says. “There was an attitude of, ‘We’re living through this together.’”
In sunnier days, CME Group had set goals of attracting more than 150 customers to the event, including a certain percentage of large-volume traders. Despite the gale-force winds buffeting the market, it surpassed pre-event goals on both counts. “We over-achieved on both,” Frink says. “We got close to 85 percent of the targeted high-volume trading firms in attendance, and we ended up with 175 attendees; 25 more than we had hoped would  attend.” Thanks to the team’s speedy shuffling, on-site content support and information services, and quick-thinking crisis management, all but two of the scheduled 22 speakers and panelists still made the trip.
Results from a post-event survey were also positive: On a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being excellent, Frink says the conference received an average score of 4.9. “People are already telling us they can’t wait to be there next year.”
Instead of a disaster, the GFLC was a
rousing success for CME Group, putting
the new entity’s brand in the spotlight for
an audience of C-level financial-industry
executives during the biggest economic
crisis to hit the country in decades. With
that achievement, it’s no surprise that
plans are already underway for
the second GFLC, albeit with
some minor changes: The
number of available seats
will increase slightly to a
still-intimate gathering of 200.
And the event will take place in November 2009 — out of hurricane season. As
for any financial storms … well, CME
Group will be prepared.E
|
|
|
 |
 |
